1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a print controller for controlling printing of an image on a printing medium.
2. Background Art
A portable printer for printing an image on an instant film on the basis of image data sent from a camera-including portable phone has been heretofore known in the related art (e.g. see JP-A-2002-92350). Besides an instant film of the type having no character on its outer frame except an image print portion, an instant film of the type having characters 2 printed on its outer frame in advance is on the market as represented by an instant film 1 shown in FIG. 9A.
According to a system described in JP-A-2002-92350, an original image can be synthesized from an image captured by a portable phone and a frame image 4 (hereinafter also referred to as “contents”) including a character 3 as shown in FIG. 9B and, for example, downloaded from a content provider to the portable phone, and can be printed on an instant film 1 to make a photograph 5 as shown in FIG. 9C.
Generally, the characters 2 and 3 are copyrighted works. If the respective characters are works with copyrights of different companies, to make a photograph such as the photograph 5 may be unfavorable to the competitive companies. If there is a mechanism for preventing such a situation, any copyrighter will provide a service of distributing frame images including copyrighted characters to users. In the present circumstances, any copyrighter is passive in providing such a service because there is no mechanism for preventing the aforementioned situation. For this reason, the condition that a photograph such as the photograph 5 can be made is actually limited only when the characters 2 and 3 are not copyrighted. It is, however, a matter of course that users still desire to make photographs like the photograph 5 by using copyrighted characters.